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Focusing on pastoralism, this article reflects on five diverse cases across Africa, Asia and Europe and asks: how have COVID-19 disease control measures affected mobility and production practices, marketing opportunities, land control, labour relations, local community support and socio-political relations with the state and other settled agrarian...
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... However, the state's ability to impose and enforce is always limited, and compromises emerge. This results in a hybrid constellation of roles, rules, and relationships, which allow pastoralists to navigate uncertainties effectively (Scott, 1990;Simula et al., 2020;Tsering, 2022a). ...
... In Lumu, the monastery serves as both the local authority and intermediator between the villages and local government. It takes these roles seriously and, consequently, the de facto use and access to resources is continuously negotiated and contested with the participation of various resource users (Tsering, 2019;Simula et al., 2020). In December 2019, Jab, the monastery secretary, concluded: ...
Gaining access to land for grazing is less straightforward than before and the individualized plot system does not allow the flexibility to manage grazing effectively. As a result, hybrid systems of rangeland governance have evolved. Such systems are neither private, nor communal, nor completely open property arrangements: they emerge from a negotiation between herd-owners, village heads, religious monastery leaders, government officials, and others. Institutional and organizational innovation therefore means that pastoralists can generate reliability in the face of new forms of variability and uncertainty.
... However, the state's ability to impose and enforce is always limited, and compromises emerge. This results in a hybrid constellation of roles, rules, and relationships, which allow pastoralists to navigate uncertainties effectively (Scott, 1990;Simula et al., 2020;Tsering, 2022a). ...
... In Lumu, the monastery serves as both the local authority and intermediator between the villages and local government. It takes these roles seriously and, consequently, the de facto use and access to resources is continuously negotiated and contested with the participation of various resource users (Tsering, 2019;Simula et al., 2020). In December 2019, Jab, the monastery secretary, concluded: ...
Insurance is often proposed as a way of offsetting risks and responding to disasters. Index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) has been offered to pastoralists in Borana zone in southern Ethiopia over the past few years. This aims to pay-out before the disaster strikes based on a predictive assessment of the season derived from satellite-based estimates of livestock forage availability. It sounds like a good solution, but does it work and for whom? IBLI has a number of assumptions; these include that the coming season can be reliably predicted; that the effects play out uniformly over an area; that the drought strikes as a single event and that livestock are held individually and responses are individualised. As the chapter shows, in the Borana rangelands, these assumptions do not hold up. Droughts are unpredictable and their effects are often quite idiosyncratic, combining with other stresses and shocks. Meanwhile, sharing and redistributive arrangements are important for livestock owners in the face of droughts, as not all risks and uncertainties are faced alone. This chapter looks at how IBLI is combined with other responses to drought in two sites in Borana. Based on in-depth interviews and surveys, the chapter shows how insurance has proven useful to some as part of a portfolio of responses. This is especially for richer cattle owners who have large herds and are mostly men. Others make less use of insurance and use other local responses, including diversification, livestock sharing, mobility and other resource management practices. These are more appropriate to responding to drought as an uncertain, unfolding flow of experiences, rather than a predictable, singular event portrayed as a calculable risk in an insurance product. Insurance is therefore not a ‘silver-bullet’ solution to dryland challenges but must be seen as part of a suite of responses, including those long used by pastoralists themselves.
The focus of attention regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been on direct health outcomes and the macroeconomic impacts of control measures. Here we review the available evidence about the food security impacts of the pandemic on pastoralists in Eastern and Western Africa. While pastoralism occurs on more than 50% of the world's land area, the landscapes that pastoralists exploit tend to be remote and highly variable arid and semi-arid lands with low population densities. Over time pastoralists have developed sophisticated mechanisms to enhance their self-sufficiency. At the same time, remoteness and sociopolitical marginalization have resulted in higher rates of food insecurity and underdevelopment among pastoralists relative to more sedentary populations. These dynamics tend to be intractable to standardized food security, malnutrition, and economic development interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to a worsening of food security trends in pastoralist areas of East and West Africa due to a multiplicity of factors, including the closure of livestock markets, movement restrictions, disruptions of supply chains and livestock production inputs, reduced frequency and quality of human and animal healthcare delivery, and lost income from complementary livelihoods. It opens, however, space for innovations that may contribute to the food-secure future of pastoralism, including adapting a One Health approach that addresses the social, economic, and environmental health determinants of food security among African pastoralists.
